Exploiting Dynamic Reuse Probability to Manage Shared Last-level Caches in CPU-GPU Heterogeneous Processors

Abstract

Recent commercial chip-multiprocessors (CMPs) have integrated CPU as well as GPU cores on the same die. In today's designs, these cores typically share parts of the memory system resources. However, since the CPU and the GPU cores have vastly different resource requirements, challenging resource partitioning problems arise in such heterogeneous CMPs. In one class of designs, the CPU and the GPU cores share the large on-die last-level SRAM cache. In this paper, we explore mechanisms to dynamically allocate the shared last-level cache space to the CPU and GPU applications in such designs. A CPU core executes an instruction progressively in a pipeline generating memory accesses (for instruction and data) only in a few pipeline stages. On the other hand, a GPU can access different data streams having different semantic meanings and disparate access patterns throughout the rendering pipeline. Such data streams include input vertex, pixel depth, pixel color, texture map, shader instructions, shader data (including shader register spills and fills), etc.. Without carefully designed last-level cache management policies, the CPU and the GPU data streams can interfere with each other leading to significant loss in CPU and GPU performance accompanied by degradation in GPU-rendered 3D animation quality. Our proposal dynamically estimates the reuse probabilities of the GPU streams as well as the CPU data by sampling portions of the CPU and GPU working sets and storing the sampled tags in a small working set sample cache. Since the GPU application working sets are typically very large, for this working set sample cache to be effective, it is custom-designed to have large coverage while requiring few tens of kilobytes of storage. We use the estimated reuse probabilities to design shared last-level cache policies for handling hits and misses to reads and writes from both types of cores. Studies on a detailed heterogeneous CMP simulator show that compared to a state-of-the-art baseline with a 16 MB shared last-level cache, our proposal can improve the performance (frame rate or execution cycles, as applicable) of eighteen GPU workloads spanning DirectX and OpenGL game titles as well as CUDA applications by 12% on average and up to 51% while improving the performance of the co-running quad-core CPU workload mixes by 7% on average and up to 19%.